Pelenomi Moiloa builds technology for voices that are usually treated as edge cases. Her work begins from a simple observation: most artificial intelligence systems do not understand how the majority of people in the world actually speak.
About Pelonomi Moiloa
Co-Founder & CEO, Lelapa AI
South Africa
Moiloa is trained as an engineer, with academic roots in biomedical and electrical engineering and advanced research experience in machine learning. Before founding Lelapa AI, she spent nearly a decade working in data science roles across industry, building and deploying machine learning systems in high-stakes environments. Over time, she became increasingly aware of a structural gap in the AI ecosystem. Language technologies worked well for a narrow set of global languages. Outside that set, performance degraded sharply.
This gap was not incidental. It reflected how data is collected, how models are trained, and whose linguistic realities are considered worth encoding. African languages, especially those shaped by code-switching, dialectal variation, and oral traditions, were consistently underrepresented. When they were included, they were often treated as simplified or static.
Lelapa AI was founded to address that imbalance at the infrastructure level. Rather than building a single application, Moiloa and her team focused on foundational language technology. The company develops multilingual language models, speech recognition systems, translation tools, and developer-ready APIs designed specifically for African languages and speech patterns.
One of Lelapa’s flagship products, Vulavula, provides speech and language capabilities across multiple African languages, including isiZulu, Sesotho, and Afrikaans. The platform is designed to handle tonal variation, dialects, and code-switching as first-class features, not exceptions. Vulavula can be integrated into customer service systems, transcription workflows, pronunciation tools, and conversational interfaces.
The decision to build infrastructure rather than consumer products is central to Moiloa’s strategy. Language, in her view, is not an application. It is a platform others build on. If that platform is weak or exclusionary, every downstream product inherits those limitations.
Lelapa’s work positions language as a technical problem with social consequences. When AI systems fail to understand how people speak, they fail in customer service, education, healthcare, and public administration. The result is exclusion that appears technical but functions structurally. Moiloa’s response has been to treat inclusion as an engineering challenge rather than a branding exercise.
Under her leadership, Lelapa AI has gained international recognition. Moiloa has been named among TIME’s most influential figures in artificial intelligence for her work on inclusive language models. She is also active in AI governance and research conversations, advocating for AI systems that reflect the linguistic and cultural realities of the societies they serve.
What distinguishes Moiloa as an entrepreneur is her insistence on technical rigor. Lelapa’s models are not framed as symbolic representation. They are built to perform. The company emphasizes accuracy, efficiency, and real-world usability, working closely with developers and institutions to ensure the technology integrates into existing systems.
Moiloa also brings a long-term view to the business. She has spoken publicly about the need to build sustainable AI companies in Africa that are not dependent on extractive data practices or short-term hype cycles. Lelapa is structured to grow through partnerships, platform adoption, and steady expansion of its language coverage.
In a global AI landscape dominated by scale and abstraction, Pelonomi Moiloa is building for specificity. She is encoding linguistic reality where it has long been ignored. Her work suggests that the future of AI will not be defined solely by larger models, but by whether those models can operate meaningfully across the full spectrum of human expression.
Lelapa AI is not trying to make African languages visible. It is making them functional. And in doing so, Moiloa is laying the groundwork for a more inclusive digital economy built not on translation, but on understanding.
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Designed as a seasonal publication, Voice of Development brings together research, reporting, and analysis meant to be read deliberately and revisited over time. Winter 2026 is a starting point: an attempt to answer, with clarity and restraint, what AIs can actually do—and what they cannot do.
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